fix(api): bound what a forged CF-Connecting-IP can buy
PR Checks / Frontend Typecheck + Tests (pull_request) Successful in 1m3s
PR Checks / Backend Smoke (pull_request) Successful in 8s
PR Checks / Build Backend (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 18s
PR Checks / Build Frontend (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 45s
PR Checks / Build Pipeline (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 10s
PR Checks / AI Code Review (Claude) (pull_request) Successful in 10s

Code review, both findings valid.

The design doc claimed Cloudflare "replaces the header, so a browser
cannot forge it", and that only the X-Forwarded-For fallback was
forgeable. That is true only for traffic that actually passed through
Cloudflare, and nothing in this process can verify that it did. Reaching
the origin directly, both headers are equally attacker-controlled — and
rotating CF-Connecting-IP mints a fresh rate-limit bucket per request,
defeating per-client limits on every endpoint including the
DataFrame-heavy /api/schools. Against abuse that is worse than the
shared bucket it replaced, which at least capped everyone together.

So the ceiling comes back. I dropped it earlier arguing it belonged at
Cloudflare; that argument assumed the keying was sound, and it is not.
GlobalRateLimitMiddleware counts all /api/ traffic in a fixed window
against a total, independent of client identity, outermost so it refuses
before any work happens. Written by hand because slowapi cannot express
a global cap: default_limits and application_limits are both keyed by
key_func, and the latter needs middleware this app does not install.

It does not make the header trustworthy — it makes trusting it
survivable. The real fix is Authenticated Origin Pulls or an origin
firewall, now documented in DEPLOY.md as the open gap it is.

127.0.0.1 is exempt: the healthcheck curls localhost from inside the
container, and starving it would restart the container and turn a load
spike into an outage loop. Keyed on the peer address, never the Host
header, which the caller sets.

Second finding: suggest_schools_typesense promised "never raises" while
the parsing loop sat outside the try, so int(None) on a malformed
document would have made a keystroke a 500. The loop now skips bad rows
rather than dropping the whole list — and a hit with no document no
longer becomes a suggestion pointing at /school/0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
This commit is contained in:
TudorandClaude Opus 5 committed 2026-08-26 20:56:32 +01:00
1 parent d2115364ae
commit 0fa1a292c7
8 files changed
+332 -50

No files matched your search

+30
View File
@@ -151,6 +151,36 @@ needed), and fails the check only when a finding is rated
**severe** (would break prod, leak data, or corrupt data). Minor findings are
informational and never block a merge.
## Rate limiting, and the Cloudflare gap
Two independent limits protect the API:
- **Per client**, via slowapi, keyed on `CF-Connecting-IP` (falling back to
`X-Forwarded-For`, then the peer address). 60/minute by default;
`/api/suggest` gets 120/minute because typing is bursty.
- **Globally**, via `GlobalRateLimitMiddleware`: a fixed 60-second window over
all `/api/` traffic, `GLOBAL_RATE_LIMIT_PER_MINUTE` (default 3000),
independent of any client identity. Requests from `127.0.0.1` are exempt so
the container healthcheck cannot be starved into a restart loop.
### Open: the origin must only accept Cloudflare
`CF-Connecting-IP` is only meaningful for requests that actually reached the
origin through Cloudflare, and **the application cannot verify that they did**.
Anything able to reach the origin directly can set that header freely and, by
rotating it, mint a fresh rate-limit bucket per request — defeating per-client
limits on every endpoint.
The global ceiling bounds the damage to total origin capacity. It does not fix
the underlying gap, and nothing in the code can. Closing it needs one of:
- **Authenticated Origin Pulls** — Cloudflare presents a client certificate the
origin requires, so non-Cloudflare traffic is refused at TLS.
- **An origin firewall** restricted to Cloudflare's published IP ranges.
Until one is in place, treat per-client limits as protection against accidents
and ordinary load, not against a determined caller.
## Feature flags (Unleash)
Flag state lives in a self-hosted Unleash instance, deployed as its own